BOOK OF THE DAY: COLIN MURPHYreviews The Challenge for Africa: A New VisionBy Wangari Maathai Heinemann, 319pp, £20
IN 1960, a young Kenyan woman named Mary Jo arrived in the US. She was one of about 300 students in the Kennedy Airlift scholarship programme, and among her peers was a man named Barack Hussein Obama. In 2004, the year that man’s son gave the keynote speech at the Democratic convention in Boston, his former fellow student won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Kenya Mary Jo left was under a state of emergency and British rule; when she returned six years later with a master’s degree and a new name, her country was independent. Abroad, she had rediscovered her African identity and had discarded her adopted Christian name for her birth name, Wangari Maathai.
This was a time of great hope. The imperial project had failed and the European nations were scrambling out of Africa. Economic growth was robust and African commodity production was strong. There was some inspirational leadership and much idealism among Maathai’s generation. So what went wrong?
From 1960 to 2001, growth in much of sub-Saharan Africa was negative, and yet the population of the continent increased more than threefold. In the early 1960s, Africa made up 10 per cent of the world’s poor. By 2000, it made up half.
The 1970s and 1980s devastated Africa. The collapse in commodity prices plunged African economies into crisis; international donors rushed in with often-reckless loans. African leaders proved deeply disillusioning, fomenting ethnic rivalry and expropriating resources. The cold war in Africa was “far from cold”, as Maathai puts it. The 1990s were blighted by the Rwandan genocide, the collapse of Somalia, the descent of Congo into a state of almost permanent crisis, and numerous other conflicts.
But this decade has been better. The South African settlement has held and, though Zimbabwe has collapsed, neighbouring Mozambique has experienced peace and steady growth. Peace has also come to Angola, South Sudan and west Africa, though Darfur and Somalia still defy international attempts (albeit weak ones) at intervention or mediation.
Economic growth has been steady, at 6 per cent to 7 per cent in many countries (before the recent global shock). The spread of mobile phones across the continent has brought a rich dividend: aid agencies, farmers, businesspeople and election monitors use them to make business and politics more efficient and transparent.
There is, in other words, hope, and Maathai is immersed in it. Indeed, The Challenge for Africa reads like an African version of The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama jnr. As with that book, this is not a work of great literature or social science. It is often bland, and lacks detail. But at its best it is both an accessible primer on the challenges facing Africa and a lucid manifesto on how to address them.
Maathai argues that a combination of colonialism, poverty, conflict and environmental degradation has alienated Africans from their culture. Without “restoration”, attempts at development and democratisation will be blighted by short-termist and divisive politics. “Planting trees, speaking our language, telling our stories, and not dismissing the lives of our ancestors are all part of the same act of conservation,” she writes.
“Our work is reclamation – bringing back what is essential so we can move forward.”
Many of those working in aid and development are permanently impatient to make that move forward, so Maathai’s idea, that Africans must look back first, is audacious and noble.
Colin Murphy is a journalist who previously worked in humanitarian aid